How to employ mean depth method to calculate cut and fill or earthwork of road

If you want to learn how to work out cut and fill (earth work) of road, railway line, canal and river with use of mean depth process, then you must follow this video lecture delivered by the renowned engineer S.L. Khan.

While making plan for the design and construction of a building, architects and engineers should focus on the prevailing conditions of the site. Normally, the specified site is not level and must be reformed prior to start of the construction work. Therefore, the cut and fill method is usually one of the first construction processes to develop on a site.

In earthmoving, cut and fill refers to the method of building up a railway, road or canal through which the amount of material from cuts roughly equalizes with the amount of fill required to produce adjacent embankments, consequently that reduces the amount of construction labor.

All the estimators or quantity surveyors frequently utilize the mean depth process to find out mean depths at every station. By applying the same depth, it is possible to compute the areas in section and then make estimation for cut and fill.

The mean depth method is described through a table that contains various heads like reduced distance (R.Ds), natural surface level (NSL), formation level (F.L), depths, mean depths (d1+d2)/2, different areas, summation of areas (∑area), interval, quantity of cut or fill.

In the video, the solution is given to the following problem :-

Problem : Calculate the quantity of earth work for a specific part of road. Formation width of the road is 10 meters. Side slopes are 1:1 in cutting and 1:2 in filling. Natural surface levels and formation levels at various stations are provided hereunder :-

To get more detailed, watch the following video tutorial.

Image Courtest: SL Khan